Are You Gonna Eat That?

One of my favorite television series is called “Firelfy”.

Don’t bother looking for it on prime-time.  It’s been cancelled.

But it’s a good show, a funny, poignant and philosophical science-fiction delight.  I bring this up because in one of the episodes, one of the ensemble characters is talking about death.  They have a dead body that they’re transporting in their space-ship, and this guy is furiously lifting weights and exercising like a maniac.  He comments that whenever he finds himself in close proximity to death, any death, he feels an overwhelming urge to move around.  He states that he wants to go run or fight or even have sex if there’s a willing woman around.  And the character that he’s speaking to comments that it’s probably a subconscious reaction to the idea of death- this desire to immerse one’s self in life-affirming, life-sustaining activity- something that really makes you feel animated.

I experience this phenomenon myself.  I suppose everyone that deals with death has some kind of  deeply visceral reaction to it that manifests in different ways.  I would suspect that for some people, their reaction is so subtle that even they aren’t aware of it.  And for still others, they're such wizened veterans… their experiences with death are so numerous, they’ve probably managed to eradicate their reactions completely… or at least water them down to a nervous tic or tiny habit.

As for me, I don’t suddenly feel inspired to go for a run or power lift.  I don’t go looking to pick a fight in a bar, and much to the disappointment of my darling husband, I don’t get insatiably horny.  Instead- I get hungry… really REALLY hungry.
I’ve heard it said (and I think that Brad Pitt’s character might have implied something to the same effect in “Fight Club”) that after a near death experience, the first food a person eats is said to be the most scrumptious fare, the most satisfying meal they have ever had in their entire life.  And seeing as how I have upwards of five near-death experiences on any given work-day (near-death as in I’m actually in the physical proximity of death- not that my life is incessantly being threatened) I can confirm that this theory is entirely correct.  I after I go to scene, I am so freakin’ hungry I could single-handedly close-down a Hometown Buffet in one night.

What’s worse- the more gruesome the death, the more voracious I become… and the more unnerved everyone else is when I emerge from a dead guy’s bedroom with blood all over my hands and announce that I’m famished and wouldn’t we all just KILL for a moon-pie right this very second?  I’d hate to think of what would happen if I ever went on a plane crash- notoriously the most heinous carnage one could ever witness.  I’d probably start picking through the scorched remains of the food carts and wondering  if just a little jet fuel in your pre-packaged salad is REALLY all that toxic.  I discovered this delightful little facet of my “problem” once when I was coming away from a “decomp” (a scene in which the body had been untended to for a few days and had actively started rotting- sorry for the visual) and for the life of me, all I wanted on God’s green earth, was an order of French fries.  I mean it, I was INTENT.  Nevermind the fact that I had dead-man goo on the bottoms of my shoes and I smelled as though I lived in the bottom of a trash-can at Denny’s.  When I finally achieved my fries, every bite was like a salty, golden miracle in my mouth.  Each crispy, oily fry was the best goddamned day of my life.  Mmmmmmm- French fries.

This quirk- this… coping mechanism, if you will, is manageable.  Of course I have to do enough exercise in a single day to burn about 3-times my body weight in calories… and that’s just to maintain my current poundage.  If, for any reason, I couldn’t get enough cardio for a while, I’d be a candidate for “The Biggest Looser” in less than a month… I mean really, my daily caloric intake is staggering, bordering on shameful.
I would say the biggest problem with this whole issue of mine is that I really want to eat dead people’s food.
 Seriously, it’s SO not okay.  You can’t even SEE the land of okay from the location of this behavior on the moral spectrum.  This behavior is town square in the worst neighborhood on the wrong side of the tracks… from “okay”.

“What’s the big deal.” You might be thinking… of if you’re not thinking THAT, you’re thinking: “Jeez Grace, that’s really gross.”  And you’d probably have a point on both counts… let me ‘splain.

As a Deputy Medical Examiner, I HAVE TO be above reproach when it comes to the belongings, or “effects” of my decedents.  It’s my job to see to it that their stuff- whether that stuff consists of a dirty back-pack or a million-dollar penthouse- is secured.  I’m the night-watchman, basically.  I lock the door and I hold the keys until the dead person’s belongings are either collected by the family- or are relinquished to state-lands for liquidation.  Making sure that no one steals the car, rifles through the house or, yes, even steals a hostess twinkie… is my responsibility.  And once you open yourself up to the temptation, to even the most innocuous and seemingly innocent slip, once you breach those walls- well I don’t know what happens, since I haven’t done it yet.  But I have done enough really fucked-up shit in my life to know that, often, granting yourself permission to commit a single act of even the slightest moral ambiguity, opens the doors for you to do it again… and again… and again.  The biggest mistakes I’ve ever made in my life were not solitary deeds.  They were a series of seemingly inane little choices, tiny surrenders, that built up and snowballed into truly deplorable acts.  So I don’t eat dead people’s food… the cup-cake stops here.

Sadly, though, I’m still powerfully tempted to do so.  It’s funny, I could walk into a mansion, literally carpeted with $100 bills and it wouldn’t even cross my mind to reach down and pocket one of them.  But when I walk into a home with a big bowl of Hershey’s Kisses on the coffee table, I fear for my immortal soul.  Holidays are the worst, when you rifle through a decedent’s kitchen looking for medications and you find your dead guy was the recent recipient of a Christmas gift basket and there’s a poor-man’s fortune in gourmet cheese and summer-sausage spread across the counter-top.  Recently, I was dispatched to a case in which a little old lady was fiddling with her dialysis shunt.* She dislodged the bandaging over the device and ended up exsanguinating with a truly impressive degree of enthusiasm pizzazz. (For those of you NOT medically inclined, it means she bled to death, but did so in a spectacular fashion.) For starters, this woman had high blood pressure and she was also on blood thinners… when you match those two factors with an artificial port directly into her central circulation that can easily be opened… what you get… is modern art.  As soon as this lady started bleeding- and I mean BLEEDING, she sprinted a couple of laps around her apartment, decorating the walls with the blood spray that probably had a radius of 2-3 feet.  At some point she had apparently decided to go running out into the hallway to seek out assistance, and in doing so, had left blood spatter all over the hallway walls and, obligingly, also smeared large quantities of it on the doors and door-frames of her nearest neighbors.   When I surveyed the scene, I couldn’t tell if it was a horror movie or an Old Testament re-enactment of Passover.  But, what’s REALLY disturbing is the fact that despite the magnificent bloodbath on display before me, I couldn’t help but note that, at the time, Valentine’s Day was coming up and some generous soul had given our dead lady a GIGANTIC box of assorted chocolates.  What’s more, the undeniable sadness and stomach-turning brutality of the scene did nothing to assuage my sudden, voracious appetite.  Instead, the situation almost seemed to amplify my compulsion to quietly shut the door to the woman’s room and commence shoveling caramel-nut clusters into my pockets.
(I know it sounds as though I’m being glib- but my own attitude was nothing shocking compared to that of the dead lady’s daughter in law.  “I know it’s a tragedy,” she admitted to me over the phone, ”But I have to say, she WAS something of a drama-queen and I think this is probably the way she would have wanted to die… you know… causing the biggest scene possible.” I couldn’t agree more, I, myself, have already decided that if I don’t get to be a cadaver on a dissecting table –thus fulfilling my dream to go to medical school in SOME capacity- I would prefer to die in a manner that leaves behind an astonishing mess.)

But by far, the biggest test of me resolve was probably the dead man’s doughnuts.

I’m not a huge doughnut eater…

… of course I’m not a petite doughnut eater either.

If they’re around and they’re free, I’ll eat doughnuts.

I suppose THAT was the crux of my struggle with the doughnuts- they were there- and for the most part, they could have qualified as “free”.

The dearly departed proprietor of the doughnuts in question had been found unresponsive in his bed after the managers of his apartment complex had failed to see him around for a couple of days.  They sent the maintenance man into his apartment to check on him- and the maintenance man discovered that the guy had laid down to take his eternal nap.  All things considered, the whole situation was entirely unremarkable and easy to manage.  The body had not yet begun it’s slow, slippery slide into decomposition.  The apartment was clean.  The decedent’s family was out of state, but easily contacted.  The only glitch was that our guy was a little young-ish to have died of natural causes (48-years-old). Various unmarked pill bottles and drug paraphernalia had been discovered in the residence.  It was a clear-cut case of natural causes vs. overdose.

When I arrived at the dead guy’s apartment, I was greeted at the door by a female deputy sheriff.   She greeted me cheerfully and flipping open her note-pad, began to read off the details of our decedent’s situation.  She was brisk, but not bitchy.  She was clearly serious about her job, but not so much so that she was devoid of the sense of humor that is, quite honestly, CRUCIAL when crisis management is one’s profession.  The two of us got to chatting as we worked our way through the dead guy’s apartment.  She marveled at his C.D. collection and obligingly used her i-phone to look up the identity of some of the tablets we were finding throughout the house.  I found myself liking her, and I was relieved that I was on a scene with someone who could adequately balance an easy-going demeanor with clipped competency.
We entered the kitchen… and I saw them.  Sitting on the dead guy’s counter-top was a clear, plastic container of glazed doughnuts.  I’m not sure if it was the lighting, the naked, unobstructed presentation of the pastries, or if it was just my personal little glitch scratching at that primal-appetite center in my brain-stem.  Regardless of the reason, in that moment, I was convinced that those doughnuts had to be the most perfect glazed doughnuts in all Christendom.  Those doughnuts were the pinnacle of all doughnut-dom.  Those doughnuts were the platonic form of which all other doughnuts were mere shadows.  I had to have one.

“Hm,” I said to the officer, as casually as I could. “doughnuts….”

She looked over at the counter.

“Yeah,” she sighed. “And Oreos too.”

Oreos?  I was so enamored of the doughnuts… so entranced by their mouth-watering plump-ness and iridescent sugary-shimmer that I didn’t even notice the unopened bag of double-stuffed Oreos positioned behind the objects of my own lust.

“You know…” I said, again, as offhandedly as possible. “When I come into a dead person’s house, there could be a stack of diamonds on the dining room table and I wouldn’t even glance at them, but … I tell ya… Show me a bowl of fruit or big ‘ol box of doughnuts…..” my voice trailed off, I stared at the doughnuts and shook my head, then glanced back at the officer.

Her eyes were bulging out of their sockets and I was certain she was about to utter something to the effect of: “Ew!”
“Oh my GOD! I’m the same way!” she gasped.

And the next thing you knew both of us had completely forgotten about all of the investigating we were supposed to be doing, forgotten about the mason-jars full of weed on the coffee table, forgotten about the dead body in the next room. Instead were comparing stories of the hungriest we’ve ever been at a scene and what we had to talk ourselves OUT of eating:

“…I’m telling you, the entire bedroom was LITTERED with Ghiradelli chocolate-raspberry squares… I wanted to eat one SOOOOOOOOOO bad….”

“… the entire pantry was STUFFED with bags of Doritos…”

“… a plate of chocolate-chip cookies just SITTING THERE by the oven…”

“… more gourmet granola bars than any human really has the right to own…”

We were so delighted by our mutual vice that we were completely unprepared for when the funeral home arrived to collect the decedent’s remains.  We had to scramble to get the rest of the scene processed and ultimately admitted to the body-transport guys that the reason we were running behind was because we were distracted by the doughnuts.

The funeral director’s gaze followed our gestures and his breath caught in his throat for a moment.

“Mmmmmmm… doughnuts…” he cooed.

We all knew that the doughnuts were going to be wasted.  They guy’s family was out of state and as we had already spoken to them from the apartment, we knew that they would not be coming into town to take care of the dead guy’s affairs for at least a week.  By the time they got there, the doughnuts would be stale… if not moldy.  Those marvelous doughnuts would be thrown away without a second thought.
Still, none of us actually went for it.  Eating a dead person’s food, though not expressly forbidden, is still wildly inappropriate.  Probably the only reason there isn’t an actual, written rule against such behavior is because most people who write such rules couldn’t fathom anyone actually wanting to eat a dead man’s doughnuts.  All the same, we all exited the apartment with many a backward glance in the direction of the dark kitchen.  But ultimately, we left the doughnuts to their lonely fate.

On the upside I came away from that experience feeling a little less freakish about my “problem”.  At least now I knew I shared this curse with one other person… a seemingly decent and well adjusted person… a person who I saw the very next day when I was called out to yet another scene in which the decedent had either suffered some kind of natural event or overdosed on narcotics.  The deputy sheriff greeted me cordially at the door, and escorted me back to the decedent’s bedroom.

“You’re gonna love this…” she said, throwing the door open and ushering me into the bedroom where our decedent lay slumped over on her bed, surrounded by the evidence of a wicked heroin habit.  However, neither of us were looking at the needles, the dirt spoons, the cigarette lighters or the elastic band wrapped around the dead lady’s arm.  At that moment neither of us could take our eyes off the night-stand… where there lay a
bright
shiny
un-opened
2-pound bag

Of peanut-butter M&Ms.